Bryn Mawr Classical Review
96.03.13

Augustine's handbook on the interpretation of scripture, designed for the Christian
rhetorician in a pulpit, is a book of genuine originality and long-lasting impact. It
was one of the first things written by Augustine after his elevation to the ambivalent
position of bishop in the church of Hippo. He evidently planned four sections or
books: one on the content of Christian instruction, one on strategies for dealing with
"unknown signs", one on "ambiguous signs", and one on modes of rhetorical presentation.
In more ways than one the text evokes Cicero's Orator, especially in the fourth
book, and the deployment of a Ciceronian model to Christian purpose itself recalls
Ambrose's De officiis ministrorum of the previous decade. The ambivalence of
his episcopal position arises from the way he and a few others like Ambrose were busily
transforming a charismatic ministry into a public office (Neil McLynn's Ambrose of
Milan (Berkeley 1995) is richly instructive in this regard.)

But
Augustine
did not finish the book he started when he started it. In his last years,
he tells us in his Retractationes, he found it incomplete in his
library (broken off in the middle of the third book) and carried it forth
to completion. (There is palaeographical evidence to suggest that the
first two books had a circulation in Augustine's lifetime before he came
back to complete the work.) I am not sure that if he had not told us, any
wise scholar would have detected the discontinuity of more than 30 years
in the work's composition.

The work's reputation in our times
depends on its curious anticipation of some of our concerns. With its
abstract discussion of "things" and "signs" it holds an important place in
the history of semiotic theory, while its application of theory to
biblical texts gives it a shaping place in the history of allegorical
interpretation generally and medieval culture specifically. The last
widely disseminated translation of the text was made in the 1950s by D.W.
Robertson, Jr., the American Chaucerian who held that this text was a key
to the interpretation of virtually all of medieval vernacular literature
and so sought a broader distribution for it. It does indeed offer a
twofold interpretation of texts that might as well be called "literal" and
"allegorical". Most readers have accepted Augustine's assertion that the
literal sense is prior to the allegorical, but the most unsettling thing
about the book is the way it really suggests the exact opposite: that
figurative use of language is natural, and the desire to take figurative
language literally is a disordered interpretation conditioned by seeing
texts on a page, where irony and metaphor can leak away. Read with that
optic, the De Doctrina Christiana is a landmark in the history of
the naturalization of the written word as a bearer of culture. The ease
with which we understand even the parts we disagree with is a sign of its
success, and its ability to mislead.

R.P.H. Green is well known for
work in fourth century Latin, especially for his magisterial edition of
Ausonius' works (Oxford, 1991). He has produced a serviceable text and
translation in a compact volume which deserves to be widely available in
paperback. The text has been reviewed against the manuscripts, but is
still based on the Green and Martin editions of a generation ago. The
translation is fresh and represents Green's most substantive contribution.
The introduction is brief and makes no original contribution, while the
annotation is quite thin and appears to arise out of a preoccupation with
this particular text and whatever puzzles present themselves rather than
any long frequentation of the Augustinian corpus. The translation is
remarkably accurate as far as Latinity goes, but falls down, when it does,
on the interpretation of substance. The first sentence of the text (pp.
2-3) is instructive:

Green: There are certain rules
for
interpreting the scriptures which, as I am well aware, can usefully be
passed on to those with an appetite for such study to make it possible for
them to progress not just by reading the work of others who have
illuminated the obscurities of divine literature, but also by finding
illumination for themselves.

One Latin sentence produces
on English
sentence, whose back might break for some readers around the phrase "to
make it possible". It would be possible to quarrel with "as I am well
aware" (the point is not that others would hold this position but that
Augustine would assert it: "video" is closer to "I think" or "I would
suggest"), but in the last phrase there is a real breakdown. "Aperire" in
this context (as in the previous phrase) is clearly used of exposition of
a text and the striking ("etiam") conjunction lies in the claim that
illumination comes not only from reading but even from the act of
interpreting for others itself. One might think of the character in
Forster who said she didn't know what she knew until she heard what she
had to say, or one might think of Augustine himself, "egoque ipse multa
quae nesciebam scribendo me didicisse confitear" (Aug. de trinitate
3, pro. 1: "and I would confess that there are many things I did not know
that I have learned in the course of writing"). (Robertson had this point
right, but a selective comparison reveals that indeed this version is
superior in accuracy on numerous points.) The error here is not so much
Latinity as sense: failing to get Augustine's point. The few other similar
points of disagreement I have found all lend themselves to the same
explanation.

This volumes comes on the heels of the recent De
doctrina Christiana : a classic of western culture (edited D.W.H.
Arnold and P. Bright: Notre Dame, 1995) and its companion volume
Reading and wisdom : the De doctrina Christiana of Augustine in the
Middle Ages (ed. by E. D. English: Notre Dame, 1995). The two are
products of a conference held in South Bend several years earlier and
present a variety of quite valuable papers. There is also a concise
commentary in Italian by Luigi Alici and others, a study of the text's
relation to Ciceronian rhetoric by Peter Prestel, and a recent Konstanz
Habilitation by Karla Pollmann that offers promise but does not yet appear
in the RLIN catalogue. One comes away feeling that the text has not yet
given up its secrets with an open hand, but for it to do so would require
a fuller and deeper study of Augustine's exegetical theory and practice
than we yet possess. In the meantime, this volume may (and should)
stimulate investigation in that direction and will find a wide and
grateful readership among patristic and medieval students.